Stephen Webster     Eye Music

Image: Sun Twister 2010 18″ x 24″  acrylic on canvas

STEPHEN WEBSTER  -  BIOGRAPHY

After a foundation year at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, Wiltshire, Stephen took a BA Hons First Class from Leeds University Fine Art Department, followed by an MA in Painting at Chelsea School of Art. He was awarded a Fellowship in Painting at Bath Academy of Art which brought him back to the west country. Since then, he has lived and worked in Bath, at one time running a small gallery above the Bridge Bookshop, where he showed Jack Smith and John Wragg RA, among others. In 1983 he became Director of the Festival Gallery, Bath for two years. Since the age of fifteen his passion for music has gone side by side with his love for painting. He lives and works in Batheaston, just outside the city of Bath.

RECENT EXHIBITIONS

THOUGHTS ON PAINTING…

As a child I loved magic, and then, as a teenager I discovered the more lasting magic of painting, music and books.

Why is that combination of shapes, colours, lines in Matisse, Klee or who-ever it might be so enthralling, moving, wonderful ? And the astonishment, thrill of recognition of coming upon Beethoven, Sibelius, Mahler……

Now that I’m silvery-haired I ‘m still held in thrall by all that grown-up, magic ‘stuff ‘. And I go on trying to make my own. I’m not interested in being original or ‘innovative’ – that dread word so over-used in the media and art-speak blurbs.

Why do I go on putting paint on canvas in our information- deluged, so-many –reasons- to-get- distracted world ?

One reason is I that I still enjoy it, most of the time. There are hours when nothing seems to happen, rain falls, spirits sink, inertia threatens. Others when a little idea or glimmer of an image leads me on – things seem possible, invention happens somehow or other, the sun shines, music plays, colours come together in unexpected ways….. the spirits lift.

I love what Stravinsky said about the creative process – that the artist is a sort of pig snouting for truffles (ah but the mud and stones you have to get through !) and that he went looking for something he recognised when he found it. Absolutely – not that I seek to compare myself with him.

The thrill of discovery, of coming upon the unexpected. Where is the song before it is sung ? Nowhere; it is found in the making, by trial and error, choosing and gazing; pondering the choices. Following the thread into and out of the maze. Painting is a journey without maps; it is making your own puzzle, then solving it. It’s the clue taken up, the glimpse in passing.

It can be like amazing good news, or the dark depths of the forest. Neither difficult or easy, but can seem like either.

“Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something upon which to rejoice .’ T.S. Eliot

I still love modernism (maybe I’m a re-modernist. ) I believe in bringing disparate things together into a unity. Even if that unity might be dismissed by some as illusion.

The process itself lures me on. What if I try this shape here, this over there….then space, line , colour. One thing leads to another. Statement – counter statement. As in music – exposition and development.

Do artists still need heroes from myth and legend , apart from the noble dead who have gone before us ?

I like Orpheus – that old poet-musician who, even when those nasty bacchantes had torn him to pieces, his head still went on singing it’s essential song as it floated along the river of time.

Let’s keep on singing our sometimes peculiar songs. Life would be unthinkable without song and dance, dreams and symbols, colour and form, poems, puzzles paintings and play.

Stephen Webster

Joan Gabie   Exploring Solitude:

a drawn response to emails from Antarctica

In ink drawings relating to text, Joan Gabie explores the sense of isolation and wonder of a world unseen by many, herself included.

This exhibition presents a glimpse of a much larger body of drawings loosely based on emails sent from her husband, Neville Gabie during a summer residency with the British Antarctic Survey team at Halley Research station on the Brunt Ice shelf.

Daily drawings evoked by lines of text, they attempt to map emotion, record ideas, celebrate relationship and explore the vagaries of virtual communication.

It is the first time this collection of drawings has been publically shown. The text and drawings will take the form of a future publication.

Seamus Staunton        Chamber works

A collection of small works by acclaimed sculptor Seamus Staunton, this exhibition comprises exquisitely made colourful constructions that are abstract, but inspired by music, poetry and landscape. Recurring themes and variations run through this series of intimate sculptures, which manage to be both mysterious and strangely familiar.

Robert Clark, of The Guardian wrote:  ‘Seamus Staunton fashions sculptures of extraordinary organic grandeur. His abstract work is so well made and structured one feels it might have some practical application. Some look like dream boats or buoys, others like foghorns or the sound boxes of some strange shell-like instrument. One way or another, they all appear to have been crafted with a passion for oceanic rhythms and sounds. This air of half-familiarity adds to their strangeness. Many resemble containers that hold nothing but a distant tremor of undefined resonance.’  

Three recent projects made in Gloucestershire will be presented: drawing as an act of public participation in Cheltenham museum; drawing as an harmonious action of body and mind, space and time in Gloucester Cathedral, and a fresh Newnham drawing performance that will record the light phenomena during the week of the equinox.

David Behar-Perahia is a French/Israeli artist who works in diverse media: video, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance, mostly within a site-specific approach. In his work he analyses the notion of ‘place’ to discover the layers that compose a local context, while relating to the cultural, social, historical and physical-geographical aspects. His background in Science and Architecture enables him to approach localities in a unique way. During the last decade he has exhibited extensively in Israel, the UK, France, Italy (including the 53rd Venice Biennale) and Greece. David Behar-Perahia is the current artist in residence at Gloucester Cathedral; view his residency blog. For further information on the artist, visit  www.davidbehar.net

This exhibition is supported by the Department of Cultural Affairs, Embassy of Israel, London.

‘Stills’, a collection of paintings by Bristol based artist Vivienne Baker, brings a welcome splash of colour to the depths of winter.  Inspired by visits to woodland places including the Forest of Dean and ancient trees in the Wye Valley, the artist has worked from memory, aided by the use of tiny low resolution photographs taken on a mobile phone.

Vivienne says:

“ I am interested (in the present high-tech climate), to make use of low-tech resources and exploit the distortion and interference that is produced with the enlargement of a low quality image, (or distortion and heightening when relying on memory).Through the use of traditional materials, using untraditional tools such as decorating rollers and spray guns, the image evolves and emerges from a slow multi-layering process, creating undefined spaces that the viewer has to work to interpret.”

“The images/memories that I work from are all scenes that I have encountered but changed and distorted during the process of painting, to reveal something new, capturing perhaps only the essence of a place or memory. They suggest that there is more to the story and stand like moments, stills from a film or an old home movie.”

“Ancient woodlands have particular appeal because of the time scale of the life in these settings, compared to the relatively short life of a human or the fleeting moment of one passing through.”